Vatican Author Puts Focus On Oscar Wilde

The Vatican’s top protocol officer has drawn widespread media attention by publishing a book that quotes extensively from the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde.Father Leonardo Sapienza, a Rogationist priest and director of protocol for the pontifical household, has produced a work entitled Pro-vocations – Aphorisms for an Anti-conformist Christianity. The work contains about 1,000 quotations regarding matters of moral character, featuring the works of Wilde.Oscar Wilde, a flamboyant Irish writer of the 19th century, fell into disgrace when he was convicted of gross indecency by a British court as the result of a homosexual affair, and sentenced to two years of hard labor. He converted to Catholicism shortly before his death in 1900.Father Sapienza explained his fascination with Wilde by saying that he had been a “writer who lived perilously and somewhat scandalously but who has left us some razor-sharp maxims with a moral.”from Catholic World News